Jayoung Yoon received her M.F.A. in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 2009 and her B.F.A. from Hongik University in Korea in 2004. She has participated in exhibitions at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, San Jose, CA; Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA; Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA; Here Arts Center, New York, NY; Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, among others.
She was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Fellowship from The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Franklin Furnace Fund. She has attended residencies at MacDowell, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Millay Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Sculpture Space. Her work has been featured in various publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Hyperallergic, Surface Design Journal, and Fiber Art Now. Yoon is currently an artist in residence at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Thank you for speaking with us, Jayoung. Could you share a bit about your practice and how it has taken its current form?
I grew up in Korea in the 1980s, hearing family stories about Japanese occupation, the Korean War, the division into North and South Korea, and decades of military dictatorships. These experiences shaped my understanding of the human condition. I began questioning why suffering exists in the world, how we heal and move forward from personal and collective memories, and how we become aware of interdependence and cultivate compassion. This is the thread that runs through my work.
When I attended the Fiber program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, I explored how I could visualize cleansing my thoughts through materiality and process. I found hair has the potential to embody both mind and matter. Hair possessed two completely distinct qualities that worked together in a way no other material could. It is intensely visceral and tactile, grounding the viewer in the present moment. And yet I tie every single strand of hair piece by piece into barely visible forms that represent ineffable thoughts. These two qualities — presence and absence, the material and the ephemeral — coexist naturally in hair.
In my early work, I created meditative video performances with these ineffable thoughts. In the videos, semi-transparent hair sculptures are lifted away from my head or body and disappear as a cleansing gesture of thoughts and memories. For example, in one of my video performances, ‘Listening to the Mind,’ I set up a funnel-shaped hair sculpture in the middle of the space and connected it to my ear. My body entered a meditative state while lying still on the floor for ten hours in silence.
Through creating these meditative works, I was drawn deeper into meditation and Buddhist teachings. I attended retreats and workshops at Vipassana Meditation, Zen Mountain Monastery, and Tibet House US, immersing myself in Buddhist teachings — particularly that all things are constantly changing and interconnected. This combination of family history, meditation practice, and Buddhist teaching has given my work its current form.
What does hair allow you to express that other materials cannot?
Hair allows me to speak about cycles in a way that thread never could. Because hair comes from the body, it carries associations of life and growth. But separated from the body, it also suggests loss, shedding, even death. And then I use it to create new forms, sculptures, and installations, so it is given new life. Sometimes those sculptures are then attached to my body again in performance, completing a cycle. Life, death, and renewal are embedded in the material before I begin.
I shaved my head completely for certain video performances, and that act carried its own layer of significance. In the Buddhist tradition, cutting off hair is understood as a gesture of releasing the ego, of loosening one’s attachment to identity and self-image. So even the act of cutting is meaningful before I have transformed it into work. And that commitment continues through the making, tying every single strand one by one, in a process that requires great patience and presence.
I once read about a Buddhist nun during the Tang dynasty, sometime between 600 and 900 A.D. in China, who cut off her hair and used it to embroider an image of the Buddha on silk fabric as an act of devotion. When I encountered that story, I recognized something I had been doing without knowing the tradition behind it. Giving of the self — not as sacrifice in a painful sense, but as an offering, as a form of love. That offering lives between myself and the viewer, between the personal and the universal, between what is given and what is received.
seeds
How do transparency, movement, and fragility shape the contemplative experience you hope to create?
In meditation teachings, it is often said that our thoughts are like clouds passing through the sky. The semi-transparency and movement in my work embody this idea—nothing is fixed, everything is in flux.
In my studio, I experience the sculptures as sometimes clearly visible and sometimes nearly invisible, depending on the time of day, the quality of light, and the angle from which you look. This is because the sculptures are so delicate, each strand of hair so fine, that they can disappear entirely in certain light. That delicacy demands careful attention. You cannot rush past these works. They require you to be present, to notice subtle changes. Our perception of the world is never stable either. A sculpture that disappears and reappears depending on where you stand reflects the impermanent nature of all forms.
The subtle movement of the sculptures responds to the slightest shift in air, revealing the invisible flow that exists in the space around us — the air we breathe but never see. The sculptures make that invisible presence visible, even if only for a moment.
How do Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics influence your forms and processes?
In quantum physics, the act of observation changes what is being observed. Our attention is not passive; it participates in shaping reality. This resonates deeply with the Buddhist teaching that our thoughts and perceptions are not separate from the world we experience. If I change my mind, if I cultivate a different awareness, that change does not stay contained within me. It ripples outward. I think of my artwork as a manifestation of my own mind and thought, offered to others in the hope that it might shift something in them too — open a space, invite a different quality of attention, and through that, contribute in some small way to a more compassionate world.
In my recent sculptural series, ‘The Fabric of Energy,’ I visualize energy flows in continuous cycles, with multiple layers nested within one another. This series is inspired by the quantum physics concept that even in apparent emptiness (the quantum vacuum), there exists a dynamic interplay of energy at the most fundamental levels. In a torus, energy flows in a continuous cycle: entering from one end, circulating around the center, and exiting from the other side. This pattern suggests balance, self-regulation, and an inherent wholeness. I use the torus shape as a visual metaphor to explore ideas of interconnectedness and continuous energy flow.
In my two-dimensional work, the Empty Void series, I create compositions of sacred geometric shapes with repeated hair lines and embed them in acrylic medium. Sacred geometry is the language of the universe, existing throughout nature — flowers, the human body, and galaxies — because these forms already carry within them the logic of interconnection. The universe generates these patterns repeatedly, across vastly different scales and contexts, because they are expressions of how things actually grow and relate to one another. With this series, I create mandalas to cultivate an awareness of oneness.
full, detail and scale views)
Thinking about community, how do ideas of interdependence, care, or shared awareness inform your work, and how do you see yourself situated within those relationships?
My mother is, perhaps more than any other single influence, the person who has shaped how I understand the relationship between art, care, and community. She is a Korean traditional dancer, musician, and therapist who dedicated her life to dancing for people carrying deep personal and social pain. I witnessed people healing through the physicality of the present moment, and understood that sometimes words cannot reach where art can.
I have also been thinking deeply about environmental destruction, climate change, and the conflicts that continue to divide us, all of it originating in the same fundamental forgetting: that humans, animals, and the environment are not separate from one another.
Interdependence is not just a concept in my work; it is embedded in the making. Every strand of hair I weave relies on the ones beside it. I think about community the same way. For me, hair is a carrier of energy and intention, and when many people contribute their hair, that energy becomes collective.
In meditation practice, the crown of the head is the highest energy center in the body, the entry point for spiritual consciousness. Hair grows from exactly this point, which leads me to believe that it carries something beyond the physical. During my residency at the Museum of Arts and Design, I have been collecting hair donations from visitors for one of my sculptures, ‘The Fabric of Energy.’ Each donor responds to the question: What positive energy do you want to contribute to our world? Their contributions, along with their answers, come together in a work about interconnectedness.
and detail views)
Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?
Being an artist, for me, is fundamentally about trying to remember who I truly am. And I think that is actually what all genuine spiritual practice is as well — a returning, a remembering. We are pure love, pure consciousness, infinite being, beneath all our accumulated identities and stories and fears. The work of a lifetime is finding our way back to that recognition, again and again.
I think it matters to remember that we are not separate from each other, from the natural world, from the consequences of our choices. That is not only a spiritual teaching. It is becoming more and more literally evident in the world around us. If my work can do anything, I hope it can offer people even a momentary experience of that truth — that we are already woven together, that we have never been separate — and perhaps from that experience, a little more care might grow.
text & photo courtesy of Jayoung Yoon
- Website: https://www.jayoungart.com
- Instagram: @jayoungart
